Family's Tumultuous Year Ends With Death Sentence For Spencer

Dusty Ray Spencer Will Go To Death Row For A Killing That Changed The Way Orange County Handles Spouse Abuse Cases.

December 22, 1992|By Bob Levenson of The Sentinel Staff

It has been an awful year for Tim Johnson.

Just 18 days after 1992 began, he watched his mother, Karen Spencer, stabbed and beaten to death by her estranged husband outside their west Orange County house. He spent the rest of the year recounting the sickening specter over and over again - to detectives, lawyers and jurors.

But as the roughest of his 18 years draws to a close, Johnson found a reason to smile Monday, as he watched a judge sentence Dusty Ray Spencer, his mother's killer, to death.

Johnson would not comment afterwards. But his father, who is Karen Spencer's ex-husband, said the sentence was a big boost to his grieving family.

''This has been hell,'' said Paul Johnson. ''I'd rather go back to Vietnam than go through this again. But I looked over at Timmy and saw him smile when the judge announced the sentence, and I felt good for him and my other children. We haven't been able to do that much.''

In contrast, Spencer, 40, remained expressionless as Circuit Judge Belvin Perry read his 15-page sentencing order to a packed courtroom.

Perry agreed with arguments from prosecutor Dorothy Sedgwick that Spencer deserved to die because Karen Spencer suffered great pain and because the killing was planned well in advance.

Spencer had attacked his wife two other times in the five weeks before her death and repeatedly threatened her life.

''The stark terror she must have felt as her life slipped away from her; the humiliation as the defendant lifted her clothing exposing her private parts to her son, while she was laying there bleeding, in pain, pleading for the defendant to stop as he bashed her head against a concrete wall, is beyond comprehension,'' Perry wrote.

The judge rejected testimony from two doctors that Spencer was not accountable for his actions because of a paranoid personality disorder compounded by alcohol abuse.

According to trial testimony, Tim Johnson tried to break up the fatal Jan. 18 attack by shooting Spencer, but the shotgun jammed. He then struck Spencer over the head with the gun, breaking the stock.

When Spencer came after him with a knife, Tim Johnson ran for help. By the time police arrived, Karen Spencer was dead.

The killing dramatically changed the way police and courts handle charges of domestic violence in Orange County.

Karen Spencer tried to get help the first time her husband attacked her, on Dec. 10, 1991. But he was released on bail, even after calling her from jail and threatening to kill her.

After a second attack, Orange County deputy sheriffs made only brief attempts to look for him, despite having leads on where he might be. On the day Karen Spencer was killed, the paperwork for an arrest warrant was still sitting on a desk at the State Attorney's Office.

Since then, arrests and prosecutions of such cases have nearly doubled and judges no longer routinely grant bail to husbands or boyfriends who have been arrested.

Spencer's sentence automatically will be appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. Should it ever be commuted to a life term, the judge also sentenced Spencer to 35 additional years in prison for the Jan. 4 attack on Karen Spencer and assaults on that day and Jan. 18 on Tim Johnson.